Otto was not the first person who tried to build an engine where the force of the combustion would directly push on the piston. In the centuries before Otto's development of the four-stroke combustion engine, many engineers worked on this issue.
Huygen's explosion engine
Christian Huygens, a scientist from the Netherlands, tried already in 1666 to push a piston upward by the explosion of shooting powder.
How the Huygens engine works
The explosion of gun powder shots the piston upward. When the piston stops at the top of the "cylinder", the gas can escape from the tub (see image). Then, the atmospheric pressure moves the piston back down and the piston lifts another weight (blue). When the piston reaches the bottom of the cylinder, a new explosion can occur.
Unfortunately, the materials could not stand such a big strain yet. Further, an exact processing was a problem. Huygens used for his first attempts a tub of a canon as cylinder. He just did not have the possibility to create such an engine. The development mended the scientists to a combustion outside of the cylinder. Papin, a student of Huygens, finally built one of the first steam engines. Nonetheless only many years later, when the classic steam engine worked already in a lot of factories without any competitors, scientists continued to think about Huygens idea with a combustion in the cylinder.
0 comments:
Post a Comment